Richard Lane likes to fight the good fight. Especially if it involves rapiers, foils and broadswords.
As a combat director, Lane is the go-to guy when actors aren’t sure what to do after they say “en garde.” For 20 years, he has choreographed fights for many plays, operas and ballets, from the stylized horse blinding of “Equus” to Puccini’s “Tosca,” to the wrenching Helen Keller-Anne Sullivan food fight in “The Miracle Worker.”
Lane, 52, is the fight director for the Marin Shakespeare Company’s new production of “Romeo and Juliet,” opening Aug. 26 at San Rafael’s Forest Meadows Amphitheatre. The show marks Lane’s 14th year working with the Marin Shakespeare Company.
“Romeo and Juliet” is a juicy project for a swordsman like Lane. With all that bad blood between the Montagues and Capulets, there’s plenty of action for him to map out.
“The play starts with an opening melee,” says Lane, who was born and raised in Brooklyn’s Orthodox community and now lives in San Francisco. “I have actors using staffs, rapiers and even one using laundry.”
Though that scene is played for laughs, the climactic fights between Mercutio and Tybalt, and later between Romeo and Tybalt, are frighteningly real. That is, if Lane does his job right.
“Stage combat is the art of actors working together to create an illusion for the audience that it’s real,” he says. “You have to endow the fight with danger.”
Though Jews aren’t generally known for their skills with the sword, Lane is an exception. In Brooklyn, he didn’t exactly grow up in a neighborhood of swashbucklers. He spent more time doing community service with his local B’nai B’rith youth group than he did dueling.
But he also discovered theater at a young age. His first role came in the school Chanukah play. He was 6 and was cast as the shamash candle for the menorah.
Over the years, he pursued theater in high school, and as a young adult, he chucked engineering school after one year to study acting in Manhattan.
One class caught his eye: “Fencing for Actors.” Recalls Lane, “On the first day, the teacher said, ‘Pick up a foil in your right hand.’ I took to it like a duck to water.”
Lane is quick to point out that stage combat is not the same as fencing. The latter, he explains, is a sport in which heavily padded contestants know they can’t get hurt. In stage combat, the idea is to convince the audience that the actors can get hurt. And in fact they sometimes do.
“None of the weapons have an edge,” says Lane, “but they have points. The tip is more than blunt. It will go through your light cotton shirt if you’re playing Romeo.”
Just as costume designers aim for authenticity, Lane also strives to make his staged combat as close as possible to real Elizabethan “hack and bash,” as he calls it.
Now in the middle of rehearsals, Lane has precious little time for newspaper interviews, but he did take a minute more to answer the most pressing question related to his field: What in the world does “swashbuckler” mean?
Apparently, a few hundred years ago, as the rapier replaced the broadsword, marauding bands of ruffians would prowl the villages at night banging (or “swashing”) on their little shields (or “bucklers”).
Back then, the term “swashbuckler” was pejorative, but now, says Lane, it means one who “smiles in the face of danger.”
These days, Lane is no longer observant, but he readily acknowledges the role his Jewish background played in shaping his life. “Though I don’t go to temple,” he says, “there’s no denying that [Judaism] has influenced my views of the world. I’m an Old Testament type of guy: just and vengeful.”
Marin Shakespeare Company’s production of “Romeo and Juliet” plays 8 p.m. Fridays through Sundays, with 4 p.m. Sunday matinees, Aug. 26 through Sept. 25, at Forest Meadows Amphitheatre, located on Grand Avenue at Dominican University, San Rafael. Tickets: $15-$26. Information: (415) 399-4488 or www.marinshakespeare.org.